To Tango on a Clock's Face
by CowboyHat
Summary: Felicie, a young pulmonologist with a Rubik-complex; Alfons, a stubborn rocket scientist with a deteriorating set of lungs. Fight and be fought if you want, but the clock never slows; both hands will align and always strike midnight.
1. Chapter 1

**To Tango on a Clock's Face**

**Alfons Heidrich**

**[Prologue:** **(**_An Unlikely Patient_**)]**

* * *

It seemed preposterous, in her mind, that such a beautiful day seemed like the nagging tug of foreboding. Out of her large office window, stories above the mild-mannered pedestrians below, Felicie could see all of the bustling life of the very heart of Munich.

The sun, a golden orb beaming down upon the towering peaks of cathedrals, tile roofing, and colorful canvas of the marketplace tents, was high in the sky, warding off dark clouds and bringing a light blanket of warmth to everything it touched. The bells of the schools rang softly and melodic in the distance, fading into the background of lively chatter. The fair city was dry and as clean as the countryside, and it warmed Felicie's heart, if just a little.

But still, that feeling, tension drawing underneath the skin, was persisting. She felt as if something was about to happen.

She frowned to herself, quickly shaking her head. The blonde picked up her maroon mug, drawing in some warm coffee. Her eyes habitually tracked around her office, the portrait of her family, bookshelves and file cabinets, and the diploma framed beautifully on the elegant French door leading to and from her office. That in itself sent a tingle of pride down her spine.

_That's right,_ she reminded herself, massaging her temples with a pleased smile. _You are a doctor, Ms. Fleischer. You simply do not believe in silly superstitions or unfounded feelings._

She blinked suddenly at an abrupt, albeit civil, knock on her door.

Leaning back on her office chair, the doctor called, "Come in."

The head that poked through the door belonged to her tireless secretary, dressed in sharp white robes near-identical to her boss's, clipboard under one arm and a new cup of coffee in the other. Setting it down with a soft _clank_ on wooden desk, she straightened, reading off a name on her clipboard.

"A patient is here to see you," she reported in a practiced, gently-calm tone. "Just a heads-up, in case you wanted to know: he is new to this type of facility. He says he's been to multiple local clinics before, and nothing has seemed to work. He was just recommended to see a specialist a few days ago."

"All right," she said airily, waving a hand in the air. She took another long sip of her coffee. "Send him in."

The secretary nodded, tearing off a sheet from the clipboard and resting it on Felicie's desk, breezing out the door. A few moments later, there was another hesitant knock, and the door handle slowly turned as if by magic. It opened a crack, and with further urging, the patient tentatively stepped in.

Who walked through the door was not someone she would have expected. He was of average height, purely blonde, blue-eyed, and pale skin hadn't even the slightest wrinkle. He wore honest clothes; they were dirty from work, perhaps, but still strong and well-made. She observed the man, practically a boy of eighteen, for a moment.

_So young, _she thought, and internally frowned. _This must be something irregular… something odd. Perhaps even something serious. _

One of the skills they teach you about when you are earning your degrees is to never try to panic the patient. So without a moment's hesitation, the blonde woman, not much older than her patient, stood up gracefully and walked towards her new client, sheet in hand.

She shook his outstretched hand firmly, meeting his level gaze with a cool smile. "Good day, Mr. Heiderich," she said, referring to the clinical records in her hand. "Welcome to my office. Please, take a seat over here if you don't mind."

She directed the young man to the leather seat directly adjacent to her large desk, skimming over the data as he settled into the chair. The doctor quickly rounded the desk again, and found her own chair as well. She studied the young man, interlacing her fingers.

Felicie reviewed what she memorized on the paper in her head before smiling at him again.

"So, Mr. Heiderich, it says right here that you've been visiting the clinics, but have been having no luck with your symptoms."

"That's right," he said, and she noted that his voice wasn't at all abnormal—in fact, it was kind, even, and gentle. "Every time, they told me it was just a bad cold, and you can't treat viruses, right? So they just told me to drink fluids and monitor the symptoms."

"No, you can't at all treat viruses," she agreed. "All you can do is hope they run their course. But apparently yours hasn't."

"No," he said, slightly deflated. "And the doctors back near the outskirts of Munich weren't quite sure of what to do with it. They ran tests, but nothing came up that they knew how to treat."

It was Felicie's turn to frown, and she skimmed over the sheet again. "No _diagnosis_, even? Hmmm… well, the doctors and nurses there are useless; we're still recovering from the war, and most people now were in it and just got a basic education before they were thrust into their position. What they said doesn't necessarily mean anything. How long have you had this so-called cold?"

His polite smile shrunk a little, but he was still making the best of it. "Five months, Ma'am."

She instantly felt a rope of frustration and blatant shock tighten in her torso, coiling her stomach into a knot of irritation. "It took them five months of symptoms to realize this wasn't your average cold? They waited _that_ long to send you here?" She inquired stiffly.

Since it was a fairly rhetorical question, she didn't wait for his answer.

"Tsk. Truly, they are useless. Well, fear not, Mr. Heiderich. You're under my care now. I'll make sure that we'll get you well in no time. Not that you seem to be having any issues, as far as I can tell. But I know that diseases aren't always one-the-surface. Tell me, personally, what you're experiences with the symptoms are. I don't care much about the prettied-up version on the paper."

"I have coughing fits every once in a while. Everything is fine, but once it strikes, the bouts last for a while. It's starting to feel… deeper in my chest, somehow." His smile was gone now, and his keen eyes seemed to shrink as he fell back on memories.

"Hmmm…" She stroked her chin. "Well, I'm sure even they checked, but if you wouldn't mind loosening your shirt, I'll listen to your heart. I want to make sure you're at the right specialist; quite obviously I am a doctoring majoring in the respiratory system, not the circulatory and all that comes with it. It'd be nice to know if this is affecting your heart as well, and if I need another doctor."

A small tinge of red rose to his cheeks; he only ever had male doctors and was quite conservative, but he humored her request with a small tug at his belt and an unstuffing of his tucked-in blouse. Her cool hands, stethoscope between two fingers, traveled up and eventually centered above the thumping of his heart.

She listened carefully to hear any heart-related issues.

No heart murmur. No issues with the path of the blood, and the workings of the heart sounded just fine to her. He had a healthy heart. She quickly retracted her hand from under his shirt, noting muscle—whatever this disease was, it certainly hadn't deteriorated him enough to cripple or weaken him, yet, if possible at all. She paused for a few extra seconds longer than normal, moving the cool metal of the stethoscope over to listen to his lungs as he breathed in an out. She waited, but nothing sounded out of place.

She jotted down some notes on her pad. Whatever it was, it was either not too lethal, might possibly go away with the right treatment, or be so gradual she would have ample time to do more research.

She tossed her pen in an empty mug. When she lifted her eyes, Mr. Heidrich was just finished resituating his slightly-dusted shirt.

"Well, there is little time for me right now, but this is a good start for an initial meeting. I'll have to reschedule you for next week, if possible. Just hand this," she said, indicating to the paper she extended to him, "to my secretary, and you can work out whatever's fine for you. And I guess I'll see you then.

"Oh, and I know you've heard this a million times, but make sure to monitor any changes," she added seriously, scoping him over again as she was sure he was too, looking unsurely at her blue eyes.

He laughed shortly. "I'll do that," he chimed.

She walked him to the door, bringing up a more superficial question than before. _Sometimes idle chatter is a nice way to become comfortable with a patient_, she reviewed, her teacher's voice drifting through her mind. _The more they like you the better your communication will be._

"So, Mr. Heiderich—," she started amicably, but her patient cut her off.

"Alfons," he said, and Felicie blinked, silently asking for elaboration. "Just call me Alfons. No need to be so formal."

She cracked a smile, this one genuine. This kid… he was a good person. She could tell. So, not completely under her own volition, she found her mouth moving to the words, "Then please be so kind as to call me Felicie."

He politely smiled at her, nodding. "Okay, Felicie. Nice to meet you."

"Likewise." She smiled in a lopsided manner. "So, anyways, Alfons… what do you do for a living?"

Again, she didn't expect what happened next. His mouth quirked, and turned into a big, hearty smile. His baby-blue eyes appeared to sparkle, although the young doctor was sure it was just because they walked past a sunny window. He seemed to habitually straighten with pride, tone as bright and honest as the sun lighting through the window.

"I build rockets, Felicie. I build the things that travel above and beyond our imagination."

**[**_And so the story begins._**]**

{A/N: I planned on putting this on Quizilla, but I'd like to see how it does here first. :) I'd appreaciate some feedback, since, although I like the idea, I'm not too sure of the quality yet. I don't pretend to know much about medicine and doctors, but I will say I'm trying. xD}


	2. Chapter 2

**To Tango on a Clock Face**

**Alfons Heidrich**

**[Chapter One:** **(**_Unprecedented Medical Mystery_**)] **

"Well Alfons Heiderich, you've certainly stumped me."

The young woman slapped down a thick stack of papers onto her desk, making nearby post-it notes flutter up in the air, paperweights on the haphazardly-cluttered mass of open books barely keeping the correct pages open.

She fell back heavily into her chair, hand immediately reaching to massage her temples. Her zircon eyes narrowed slightly, taking in the vast amount of research on the pages displayed before her for the sixth time.

_There were hundreds of diseases Felicie could name, and she could specify each and every unique symptom they were associated with. There were over a hundred respiratory diseases she could examine to try to help her, and there were pretty much over a hundred tests that she could couple with them to help prove her theories, or disprove them._

_Either way, they were all beneficial in diagnosing the young man's disease._

_Felicie often compared a disease to a puzzle, or even to a court case. There was always a reason behind it, always a big picture, and it was up to the person interested to research all they could, think up every possible theory, and find out the cause and effect to come up with the thesis to cure them. _

_In a large way, the mystery behind that which is all sickness is what intrigued her the most._

_The blonde doctor threw out a page containing a test result. Its crumpled form hit the inside of the trash bin, and found its rightful place atop its predecessors. She twirled in her chair, eyeing the remaining stack. _

_She had run every test possible in the time allotted, getting her hands on every test up-to-date. She could care less what the other doctors had said. And then she ran them again. And now, she was running all the tests known to man that she had __**left**__._

"_We need to expedite this process," she muttered to herself. She splayed her fingers over the sheets, spreading them out. She skimmed them through, pushing them one-by-one off the desk to see-saw slowly to the floor within a few seconds of her eyes landing on them._

"_Trash. Bogus. Unlikely. Unrelated," she muttered with each banishment of a paper from her desk. Finally, she reached the last sheet of paper on her desk. She glared it down, sourly doubting its ability to prove itself better than the others. She closed her eyes, flicking it away._

"_Unheard of."_

_After a moment, something gradually fell into place in her head. She hummed deep in her throat in thought, the sound reverberating through the depths of her through. Felicie rounded her desk, kneeling down carefully to pick up the paper that she just discarded. She frowned, touching upon the feeling in her gut that instinctually told her there was something there._

_She read it more carefully this time._

_There was absolutely no relation between this man's disease and her patient's current—the file's turned out that the bad throat illness set off a heart disease, sending him to a completely different wing of the hospital. But still, in the meantime, they were treating him for a throat issue, until the signs of the damage to his heart were obvious enough even for doctors not deeply studying in that field._

_His body was dissected in an autopsy for research later, and gave birth to the knowledge of a new, rare disease._

_Case in point: the man died, his time ticking away on the clock because his doctors refused to consider that it was something different—that there wasn't another disease out there for which there were no tests for._

_Felicie rubbed her chin, gently placing the paper at the very center of her desk._

_Alfons's case certainly might be the same sort of thing. And she'd be damned if she was like one of those fools who'd figured themselves the epitome of all medical knowledge, far above their peers, and far above reasoning with anything suggesting other than what they knew. _

_She knew she was very much human, and human nature is to develop and learn—that's what her job was. To find out an illness and learn to treat it. And things weren't always mapped out._

_Especially since human's weren't the only things developing._

Felicie finally sighed after critically glancing over the sum of information, flopping the outside covers over and shoving them all to the end of her desk in a tall arrangement. They all had brightly-colored post-it notes marking pages of importance that'd she'd want to use as reference later.

It appeared that she'd need just about as much research gathered if she wanted to cure Alfon's disease.

Running her hands over the miniscule amount of free workspace, she shoved herself back off of the desk. She had that same tingling feeling under her fingertips, the tension at the back of her neck. Clasping her restless hands behind her back, she leaned against the windowpane to glance out at the mild, darkening street below her. Her eyes lazily picked out a few passer-by's, but not really registering them.

Her mind was far away.

"_Is Mr. Heiderich still waiting outside?" Felicie asked her secretary, and she shot her a strange look before poking her head back outside for a brief moment before returning it back. In a frazzled manner, she responded._

"_Why, uh, yes he is." _

_Felicie sighed, but a paradoxical smile lit the corners of her mouth. She stood from her chair, and glided out into the reception area. She didn't often venture there, usually nose-deep in some report in her office, so she glanced around the room of chairs, tables, and magazines with slight unfamiliarity until her gaze settled on a blonde head._

"_Alfons," she said calmly. She beckoned him with her hand, leading him into her office. The door closed softly behind them, but it was like a stone being cast into a pond—the small noise rippled, extending into the solemnly-quiet corners of the room._

_From the corner of her eye, she saw the look in Alfons's eye turn enigmatic, and noted the slight tense draw into his muscles._

_Perhaps he could sense it, she thought to herself, before pulling a lowly armchair next to the one her patients often sat in, withering under the hefty news her job required her to bestow upon them. Alfons fell into place in the chair like a puzzle, and faceless people flitted across her mind in the same position. _

_She brushed the mannequins out of her mind, and slapped Alfons to the forefront of her conscious. _

_He was her priority. And she wouldn't let him be caught in an unstoppable downward cycle._

_She could do this._

"_You have tremendous patience," Felicie commented, grinning minutely at the blonde man adjacent her. "If it was me, I'd have left the facility by now."_

_His mouth quirked into a crooked smile. "Time flies when you have a year's buildup of old magazines at your fingertips. Makes you really familiar with the petty history of our country's fashion wars and year-old gossip." _

_Felicie snorted to stifle her laughter. "Yes… I'll have Linda go and fix that soon. But I assure you, the only reason this took so long was because I retested all the samples and examined plenty of former medical cases."_

_Alfons paused for a moment, but couldn't resist asking. "And what did you find?"_

_Felicie sighed for a moment in self-disgust, rubbing her eyes into her hand. "Yes… this is where it gets tricky. I didn't find anything. In fact, as far as all I have, I don't see a precedent. Your disease has so many common symptoms with other diseases—tuberculosis for example. But here you are, all hearty, healthy, and somehow __chronic__."_

_Alfons's face deadpanned serenely. He might have seen this coming, although due to her bravado earlier in the week, he almost expected her to whisk him into a whirl of treatments, and he be without the constant nag of coughing fits._

_The slight upward tilt of his eyebrows gave him away, and her heart gaze a squeeze at the helplessness he was trying to conceal for months. _

"_Although…" she drawled, suddenly reeling him back into the conversation. She didn't want him getting lost in a sudden rush of fear and saddness, drowned in his emotions badly enough to not hear her. "I must say, there's something there."_

_Those arched eyebrows furrowed in thought. "What do you mean?"_

_She re-crossed her legs."What I mean is that I don't think your disease is unsolvable. Puzzling, yes, and unprecedented, you betcha, but I think I can solve it. You could say you __interest__ me, Alfons, and that's a good thing. I think I'll take your case and run with it—I'll be doing some research and I will find what's troubling you." _

_He cocked an eyebrow, shifting a little closer to listen. _

"_I'll take out some more books; contact a few friends of mine. Maybe they have something in their files that can help. Maybe I'll catch something promising. In the meantime, try to take some downtime, okay? I'll contact you when I have something, or need any more information."_

_His eyes flickered to the side for an instant, but Felicie caught it and narrowed her precise gaze onto him. "Alfons," she warned. She knew that look. All young men had that look when they were going to not follow orders._

_He sighed. "Okay," he said remorsefully. "But I still need to work. We're looking to get sponsored, and we really need to impress right now. My friends and I are counting on it."_

_It was the doctor's turn to sigh. "Fine," she said. "But only if you make sure to rest and get plenty of food and fresh air. I don't want you overstressed or overworked. I mean it. I can take hefty measures if I have to."_

"_All right, all right," he laughed, putting his hands up in surrender._

_She smiled approvingly. "All right then," she said, smiling coyly. She uncrossed her legs and stowed some books in her bag, glancing at the clock. "Well, I do believe it's far past closing hours, and my secretary is in dire need of rest, no matter how much coffee she ingests. Let's get some sleep."_

"_Sure," Alfons smiled. "See you soon, hopefully."_

Felicie hoisted the bag further up on her shoulder, staring out at the finally-dark streets of inner Munich. Hotel lights glowed warmly in the distance, a few rogue cars flashing through the streets, moon illuminating their paint and casting malevolent shadows on the churches and other architecture integral to the city.

Her own car patiently was parked directly below, silently waiting.

_It's time I leave,_ she thought, thinking of a few moments ago when she'd seen Alfons out the door. She glanced over her desk, and stared at the multitude of books and coffee-ringed pottery mugs.

_It's been a few days since I've been home… I think I'll take these with me and go shopping tomorrow,_ she decided, pushing more scientific literature into the waiting mouth of her firmly-woven bag, and hooking her finger around the handles of the mugs.

She took a quick glance around her office, having multi-functional purposes, such as serving as a temporary home, which looked very sad at nighttime. Maybe the fountain of emotions had soaked into the walls, the normalcies of her day-to-day job finally taking their toll.

The pulmonologist shook her head.

_Ridiculous, _she thought, and headed out to her car, slamming the ornate door behind her.

**[**_Brush away the nagging of doubt._**]**

{A/N: A degree in, oh, medicine might help me write this story. x3 But alas, you'll all have to put up with my research and "convincing" vague-specificnesss~. :D Reviews are very much appreciated; it keeps me vivacious. ^^}


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